Author | Leonard Wibberley |
---|---|
Language | English |
Genre | Fiction, Satire |
Publisher | Little, Brown & Co. |
Publication date | 9 February 1955 [1] |
Publication place | United States |
Media type | Print (Hardback) |
ISBN | 978-0-316-93872-3 |
OCLC | 1016437 |
Followed by | Beware of the Mouse |
The Mouse That Roared is a 1955 satirical novel by Irish writer Leonard Wibberley, which launched a series of satirical books about an imaginary country in Europe called the Duchy of Grand Fenwick. Wibberley used the premise to make commentaries about modern politics and world situations, including the nuclear arms race, nuclear weapons in general, and the politics of the United States.
The novel originally appeared as a six-part serial in The Saturday Evening Post from 25 December 1954 through 29 January 1955, under the title The Day New York Was Invaded. It was published as a book in February 1955 by Little, Brown. [2] The British edition [3] used the author's original intended title, The Wrath of Grapes, a play on John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath .
Wibberley wrote one prequel (1958's Beware of the Mouse) and three sequels: The Mouse on the Moon (1962), The Mouse on Wall Street (1969), and The Mouse That Saved the West (1981). Each placed the tiny Duchy of Grand Fenwick in a series of absurd situations in which it faced superpowers and won.
The tiny (three miles by five miles) European Duchy of Grand Fenwick, located in the Alps between Switzerland and France, proudly retains a pre-industrial economy, dependent almost entirely on making Pinot Grand Fenwick wine. However, a California winery makes a knockoff version, "Pinot Grand Enwick", putting the country on the verge of bankruptcy.
The prime minister decides that their only course of action is to declare war on the United States. Expecting a quick and total defeat (since their standing army is tiny and equipped with bows and arrows), the country confidently expects to rebuild itself through the largesse that the United States bestows on all its vanquished enemies (as it did for Germany through the Marshall Plan at the end of World War II).
With the counterfeit wine as a casus belli , they send a formal written declaration of war, but this is misplaced by the United States Department of State. Receiving no response, the Duchy is forced to muster some troops and hire a ship to stage an actual invasion.
Landing in New York City, almost completely deserted above ground because of a citywide disaster drill, the Duchy's invading "army" (composed of the Field Marshal Tully Bascomb, three men-at-arms, and 20 longbowmen) wanders to a top secret government lab and unintentionally captures the "Quadium Bomb" (a prototype doomsday device that could destroy the world if triggered) and its maker, Dr. Kokintz, an absent-minded professor who is working through the drill. This "Q-Bomb" has a theoretical explosive potential greater than all the nuclear weapons of the United States and the Soviet Union combined.
The invaders from Fenwick are sighted by a civil defence squad and are immediately taken to be "men from Mars" when their chain mail is mistaken for reptilian skin. The United States Secretary of Defense pieces together what has happened (with help from the five lines in his encyclopedia on The Duchy of Grand Fenwick and the Fenwickian flag left behind on a flagpole) and is both ashamed and astonished that the United States was unaware that it had been at war for two months.
With the most powerful bomb in the world now in the smallest country in the world, other countries are quick to react, with the Soviet Union and the United Kingdom offering their support. With the world at the tiny country's mercy, Duchess Gloriana, the leader of Grand Fenwick, lists her terms: all the nuclear weapons of the powerful nations must go through an inspection by impartial scientists. Continued inspection of the continuing nuclear programs of the world powers will be supervised by Dr. Kokintz, who recalls his identity as a Fenwick-American and accepts repatriation to his ancestral home. Kokintz takes on his new role as scientific director of the "Tiny Twenty", a new superpower of 20 of the world's smallest nations headed by Grand Fenwick. The United States and the other world powers accept these humiliating terms, leading to hope for world peace.
As a celebration of the triumphant outcome of the war, Duchess Gloriana and Tully Bascomb are united in marriage. As a sequel to the marriage, Dr. Kokintz accidentally drops the Q-Bomb onto the stone floor of the Grand Fenwick castle dungeon. As a result of this mishap, the scientific director inadvertently discovers that the Q-bomb is, and always has been, a powerless dud. The book concludes with Kokintz deciding to keep this key fact to himself.
Wibberley got the idea from the US peace treaty negotiated with Japan by John Foster Dulles, which included generous amounts of aid to Japan. He wrote an article for the Los Angeles Times which suggested that his native Ireland make a token invasion of the US to get aid. He then developed this into a novel changing Ireland to the Duchy of Grand Fenwick. [4]
This section needs expansion. You can help by adding to it. (August 2012) |
Anthony Boucher praised the novel as "utterly delightful...a very nearly perfect book, on no account to be missed." [5]
The Mouse That Roared was made into a 1959 film starring Peter Sellers in three roles: Duchess Gloriana XII; Count Rupert Mountjoy, the Prime Minister; and Tully Bascomb, the military leader – and Jean Seberg, as Helen Kokintz, as an added love interest. Other cast members included: William Hartnell as Sergeant-at-Arms Will Buckley; David Kossoff as Professor Alfred Kokintz; Leo McKern as Benter the opposition leader; MacDonald Parke as General Snippet; and Austin Willis as the United States Secretary of Defense. In 1963, a sequel, based on The Mouse on the Moon , was released.
The Mouse That Roared was adapted for the stage by Christopher Sergel in 1963. The play portrays Duchess Gloriana XII as twenty-two years old, as in Wibberley's novel. In this version, Dr. Kokintz is a physics professor at Columbia University and the arrival of Tully Bascomb's invasion force coincides with a campus student protest. Thus, the Fenwick soldiers are mistaken for being eccentric protesters rather than as foreign invaders. [6]
In 1964, Jack Arnold produced a television pilot based on the film, with Sid Caesar playing the three roles that Sellers had played, but it was not picked up for production. [7]
BBC Radio 4 broadcast a one-hour adaptation on 15 February 2003 [8] and 22 May 2010 as part of its Saturday Play series. [9] The production was directed by Patrick Rayner and starred Julie Austin as Gloriana, Mark McDonnell (who co-adapted the book for radio) as Tully, Crawford Logan as Count Montjoy, Simon Tait as Dr. Kokintz and Steven McNicoll (who also co-adapted the book) as Mr. Benter.
Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb is a 1964 political satire black comedy film cowritten, produced, and directed by Stanley Kubrick and starring Peter Sellers in three roles, including the title character. The film, financed and released by Columbia Pictures, was a co-production between the United States and the United Kingdom.
Duke is a male title either of a monarch ruling over a duchy, or of a member of royalty, or nobility. As rulers, dukes are ranked below emperors, kings, grand princes, grand dukes, and sovereign princes. As royalty or nobility, they are ranked below princes and grand dukes. The title comes from French duc, itself from the Latin dux, 'leader', a term used in republican Rome to refer to a military commander without an official rank, and later coming to mean the leading military commander of a province. In most countries, the word duchess is the female equivalent.
A duchy, also called a dukedom, is a country, territory, fief, or domain ruled by a duke or duchess, a ruler hierarchically second to the king or queen in Western European tradition.
Jean was the Grand Duke of Luxembourg from 1964 until his abdication in 2000. He was the first Grand Duke of Luxembourg of French agnatic descent.
The Duchy of Grand Fenwick is a tiny fictional country created by Leonard Wibberley in a series of comedic novels beginning with The Mouse That Roared (1955), which was made into a 1959 film.
Leonard Patrick O'Connor Wibberley, who also published under the name Patrick O'Connor, among others, was an Irish author who spent most of his life in the United States. Wibberley, who published more than 100 books, is perhaps best known for five satirical novels about an imaginary country Grand Fenwick, particularly The Mouse That Roared (1955).
"Sideshow Bob's Last Gleaming" is the ninth episode of the seventh season of the American animated television series The Simpsons. It originally aired on Fox in the United States on November 26, 1995. In this episode, Sideshow Bob attempts to rid Springfield of television by threatening to detonate an atomic bomb. When that backfires, he attempts to kill Bart once again, but this time along with Krusty the Clown.
Invasion literature is a literary genre that was popular in the period between 1871 and the First World War (1914–1918). The invasion novel was first recognised as a literary genre in the UK, with the novella The Battle of Dorking: Reminiscences of a Volunteer (1871), an account of a German invasion of England, which, in the Western world, aroused the national imaginations and anxieties about hypothetical invasions by foreign powers; by 1914 the genre of invasion literature comprised more than 400 novels and stories.
Superior Saturday is the sixth novel by Garth Nix in his The Keys to the Kingdom series. It tells part of the story of a boy named Arthur as he tries to gain control of a magical world.
Ruritanian romance is a genre of literature, film and theatre comprising novels, stories, plays and films set in a fictional country, usually in Central or Eastern Europe, such as the "Ruritania" that gave the genre its name.
From August 1914 until the end of World War I on 11 November 1918, the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg was under full occupation by the German Empire. The German government justified the occupation by citing the need to support their armies in neighbouring France, although many Luxembourgers, past and present, have interpreted German actions otherwise.
World War III, sometimes abbreviated to WWIII, is a common theme in popular culture. Since the 1940s, countless books, films, and television programmes have used the theme of nuclear weapons and a third global war. The presence of the Soviet Union as an international rival armed with nuclear weapons created persistent fears in the United States and vice versa of a nuclear World War III, and popular culture at the time reflected those fears. The theme was also a way of exploring a range of issues beyond nuclear war in the arts. U.S. historian Spencer R. Weart called nuclear weapons a "symbol for the worst of modernity."
The Mouse on the Moon is a 1963 British comedy film, the sequel to The Mouse That Roared. It is an adaptation of the 1962 novel The Mouse on the Moon by Irish author Leonard Wibberley, and was directed by Richard Lester. In it, the people of the Duchy of Grand Fenwick, a microstate in Europe, attempt space flight using wine as a propellant. It satirises the space race, Cold War and politics.
Battle Beneath the Earth is a 1967 British sci-fi thriller film directed by Montgomery Tully and starring Kerwin Mathews. It was released by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.
Curious Notions is an alternate history novel by Harry Turtledove. It is a part of the Crosstime Traffic series. In Curious Notions, the Central Powers won World War I prior to the United States entering the war. Subsequently, the German Empire invaded and conquered the United States in the 1950s. The story is set 150 years later, in German-occupied San Francisco. The main plot deals with time travelers from our universe establishing an electronics shop in San Francisco, coming under the suspicion of both the German authorities and the Tongs while preventing the Germans from duplicating the time travel technology.
The Mouse on the Moon is a novel by Irish author Leonard Wibberley. It was released in 1962 as the sequel to The Mouse That Roared and Beware of the Mouse. In it, the people of the Duchy of Grand Fenwick, a tiny isolated country in the Alps, attempt a space flight using wine as a propellant. It satirizes the space race, Cold War and politics. In 1963 it was adapted into a film The Mouse on the Moon.
The Mouse That Roared is a 1959 British satirical comedy film on a Ban The Bomb theme, based on Leonard Wibberley's novel The Mouse That Roared (1955). It stars Peter Sellers in three roles: Duchess Gloriana XII; Count Rupert Mountjoy, the Prime Minister; and Tully Bascomb, the military leader; and co-stars Jean Seberg. The film was directed by Jack Arnold, and the screenplay was written by Roger MacDougall and Stanley Mann.
The Grand Duchy of Hesse and the United States began relations in 1829 with mutual recognition going through expansion in 1868 when the Duchy joined the German Empire in 1871. Relations would eventually end with World War I when the U.S. declared war on Germany.